This generated a huge response, probably rather larger than he was expecting from an off-hand tweet. Now, I’m not going to get into the ethics of milk production because it’s beyond the scope of this blog (and let’s keep it out of the comments? — kthxbye) but I do want to consider one fairly long thread of responses which ran the gamut from ‘humans are the only species to drink the milk of another animal’ (actually, no) to ‘there’s no benefit to dairy’ (bear with me) and ending with, in essence, ‘dairy is slowly killing us‘ (complicated, but essentially there’s very little evidence of any harm).

Humans have been consuming dairy products for thousands of years.

But wait. If dairy is so terrible for humans, and if there are no advantages to it, why do we consume it at all? Dairy is not a new thing. Humans have been consuming foods made from one type of animal milk or another for 10,000 years, give or take. That’s really quite a long time. More to the point (I don’t want to be accused of appealing to antiquity, after all), keeping animals and milking them is quite resource intensive. You have to feed them, look after them and ensure they don’t wander off or get eaten by predators, not to mention actually milk them on a daily basis. All that takes time, energy and probably currency of some sort. Why would anyone bother, if dairy were truly detrimental to our well-being?

In fact, some cultures don’t bother. The ability to digest lactose (the main sugar in milk) beyond infancy is quite low in some parts of the world, specifically Asia and most of Africa. In those areas dairy is, or at least has been historically, not a significant part of people’s diet.

Which is interesting because it suggests, if you weren’t suspicious already, that there IS some advantage to consuming dairy. The ability to digest lactose seems to be a genetic trait. And it seems it’s something to do, really quite specifically, with your geographic location.

Which brings us to vitamin D. This vitamin, which is more accurately described as a hormone, is a crucial nutrient for humans. It increases absorption of calcium, magnesium and phosphate, which are all necessary for healthy bones (not to mention lots of other processes in the body). It’s well-known that a lack of vitamin D leads to weakened bones, and specifically causes rickets in children. More recently we’ve come to understand that vitamin D also supports our immune system; deficiency has been meaningfully linked to increased risk of certain viral infections.

How much UVB you’re exposed to depends on where you live. If you live anywhere near the equator, no problem. You get UVB all year round. Possibly too much, in fact – it’s also linked with skin cancers. But if you live in northerly latitudes (or very southerly), you might have a problem. In the summer months, a few minutes in the sun without sunscreen (literally a few minutes, not hours!) will produce more than enough vitamin D. But people living in UK, for example, get no UVB exposure for 6 months of the year. Icelanders go without for 7, and inhabitants of Tromsø, in Norway, have to get by for a full 8 months. Since we can only store vitamin D in our bodies for something like 2-4 months (I’ve struggled to find a consistent number for this, but everyone seems to agree it’s in this ballpark), that potentially means several months with no vitamin D at all, which could lead to deficiency.

In the winter northern Europeans don’t receive enough UVB light from the sun to produce vitamin D in their skin.

In the winter, northern Europeans simply can’t make vitamin D3 in their skin (and for anyone thinking about sunbeds, that’s a bad idea for several reasons). In 2018, this is easily fixed – you just take a supplement. For example, Public Health England recommends that Brits take a daily dose of 10 mcg (400 IU) of vitamin D in autumn and winter, i.e. between about October and March. It’s worth pointing out at this point that a lot of supplements you can buy contain much more than this, and more isn’t necessarily better. Vitamin D is fat-soluble and so it will build up in the body, potentially reaching toxic levels if you really overdo things. Check your labels.

Oily fish is an excellent source of vitamin D.

But what about a few thousand years ago, before you just could pop to the supermarket and buy a bottle of small tablets? What did northern Europeans do then? The answer is simple: they had to get vitamin D from their food. Even if it’s not particularly well-absorbed, it’s better than nothing.

Of couse it helps if you have access to lots of foods which are sources of vitamin D. Which would be… fatty fish (tuna, mackerel, salmon, etc) – suddenly that northern European love of herring makes so much more sense – red meat, certain types of liver, egg yolks and, yep, dairy products. Dairy products, in truth, contain relatively low levels of vitamin D (cheese and butter are better than plain milk), but every little helps. Plus, they’re also a good source of calcium, which works alongside vitamin D and is, of course, really important for good bone health.

A side note for vegans and vegetarians: most dietry sources of vitamin D come from animals. Certain mushrooms grown under UV can be a good source of vitamin D2, but unless you’re super-careful a plant-based diet won’t provide enough of this nutrient. So if you live in the north somewhere or you don’t, or can’t, expose your skin to the sun very often, you need a supplement (vegan supplements are available).

Fair skin likely emerged because it allows for better vitamin D production when UVB levels are lower.

One thing I haven’t mentioned of course is skin-colour. Northern Europeans are generally fair-skinned, and this is vitamin D-related, too. The paler your skin, the better UVB penetrates it. Fair-skinned people living in the north had an advantage over those with darker skin in the winter, spring and autumn months: they could produce more vitamin D. In fact, this was probably a significant factor in the evolution of fair skin (although, as Ed Yong explains in this excellent article, that’s complicated).

In summary, consuming dairy does have advantages, at least historically. There’s a good reason Europeans love their cheeses. But these days, if you want to eat a vegan or vegetarian diet for any reason (once again, let’s not get into those reasons in comments, kay?) you really should take a vitamin D supplement. In fact, Public Health England recommends that everyone in the UK take a vitamin D supplement in the autumn and winter, but only a small amount – check your dose.

By the way, if you spot any ‘diary’s let me know. I really had to battle to keep them from sneaking in…

When I was writing my summary of 2017 I said that there would, very probably, be some sort of food health scare at the start of 2018. It’s the natural order of things: first we eat and drink the calorie requirement of a small blue whale over Christmas and New Year, and then, lo, we must be made to suffer the guilt in January. By Easter, of course, it’s all forgotten and we can cheerfully stuff ourselves with chocolate eggs.

Plastic waste, particularly plastic waste which is improperly disposed of and consequently ends up in the wrong place, is indisputably something that needs to be addressed. But this highlighting of the plastic waste problem had an unintended consequence: where was the story going to go? Everyone is writing about how plastic is bad, went (I imagine) editorial meetings in offices around the country – find me a story showing that plastic is even WORSE than we thought!

Yikes. It’s all quite scary. It’s true that right now you can’t really avoid plastic. Look around you and it’s likely that you’ll immediately see lots of plastic objects, and that’s before you even try to consider all the everyday things which have plastic coatings that aren’t immediately obvious. If you have young children, you’re probably drowning in plastic toys, cups, plates and bottles. We’re pretty much touching plastic continually throughout our day. How concerned should we be?

BPA is a rather pleasingly symmetrical molecule with two phenol groups. (A big model of this would make a wonderfully ironic pair of sunglasses, wouldn’t it?) It was first synthesized by the Russian chemist Alexander Dianin in the late 19th century. It’s made by reacting acetone – which is where the “A” in the name comes from – with two phenol molecules. It’s actually a very simple reaction, although the product does need to be carefully purified, since large amounts of phenol are used to ensure a good yield.

It’s been used commercially since the fifties, and millions of tonnes of BPA are now produced worldwide each year. BPA is used to make plastics which are clear and tough – two characteristics which are often valued, especially for things like waterproof coatings, bottles and food containers.

The concern is that BPA is an endocrine disruptor, meaning that it interferes with hormone systems. In particular, it’s a known xenoestrogen, in other words it mimics the female hormone estrogen. Animal studies have suggested possible links to certain cancers, infertility, neurological problems and other diseases. A lot of the work is fairly small-scale and, as I’ve mentioned, focused on animal studies (rather than looking directly at effects in humans). Where humans have been studied it’s usually been populations that are exposed to especially high BPA levels (epoxy resin painters, for example). Still, it builds up into quite a damning picture.

BPA has been banned from baby bottles in many countries, including the USA and Europe

Of course, we don’t normally eat plastic, but BPA can leach from the plastic into the food or drink that’s in the plastic, and much more so if the plastic is heated. Because of these concerns, BPA has been banned from baby bottles (which tend to be heated, both for sterilisation and to warm the milk) in several countries, including the whole of Europe, for some years now. “BPA free” labels are a fairly common sight on baby products these days. BPA might also get onto our skin from, for example, those thermal paper receipts The Sun article mentioned, and then into our mouths when we eat. Our bodies break down and excrete the chemical fairly quickly, in as little as 6 hours, but because it’s so common in our environment most of us are continually meeting new sources of it.

How much are we getting, though? This is a critical question, because as I’m forever saying, the dose makes the poison. Arsenic is a deadly poison at high levels, but most of us – were we to undergo some sort of very sensitive test – would probably find we have traces of it in our systems, because it’s a naturally-occuring mineral. It’s nothing to worry about, unless for some reason the levels become too high.

When it comes to BPA, different countries have different guidelines. The European Food Safety Authority recommended in January 2015 that the TDI (tolerable daily intake) should be reduced from 50 to 4 µg/kg body weight/day (there are plans for a new assessment in 2018, so it might change again). For a 75 kg adult, that translates to about 0.0003 g per day. A USA Federal Drug and Administration document from 2014 suggests a NOAEL (no-observed-adverse-effect-level) of 5 mg/kg bw/day, which translates to 0.375 g per day for the same 75 kg adult. NOAEL values are usually much higher than TDIs, so these two figures aren’t as incompatible as they might appear. Tolerable daily intake values tend to have a lot of additional “just in case” tossed into them – being rather more guidance than science.

The European Food Standards Authority published a detailed review of the evidence in 2015 (click for a summary)

So, how much BPA are we exposed to? I’m going to stick to Europe, because that’s where I’m based (for now…), and trying to look at all the different countries is horribly complicated. Besides, EFSA produced a really helpful executive summary of their findings in 2015, which makes it much easier to find the pertinent information.

The key points are these: most of our exposure comes from food. Infants, children and adolescents have the highest dietary exposures to BPA, probably because they eat and drink more per kilogram of body weight. The estimated average was 0.375 µg/kg bw per day. For adult women the estimated average was 0.132 µg/kg bw per day, and for men it was 0.126 µg/kg bw per day.

When it came to thermal paper and other non-dietary exposure (mostly from dust, toys and cosmetics), the numbers were smaller, but the panel admitted there was a fair bit of uncertainty here. The total exposure from all sources was somewhere in the region of 1 µg/kg bw per day for all the age groups, with adolescents and young children edging more toward values of 1.5 µg/kg bw per day (this will be important in a minute).

Note that all of these numbers are significantly less than the, conservative, tolerable daily intake value of 4 µg/kg bw per day recommended by EFSA.

Here’s the important bit: the panel concluded that there is “no health concern for BPA at the estimated levels of exposure” as far as diet goes. They also said that this applied “to prenatally exposed children” (in other words, one less thing for pregnant women to worry about).

When it came to total exposure, i.e. diet and exposure from other sources such as thermal paper they concluded that “the health concern for BPA is low at the estimated levels of exposure”.

What about those frankly quite terrifying headlines? Well, firstly The Sun article was based on some work conducted on a grand total of 208 receipts collected in Southeast Michigan in the USA from only 39 unique business locations. That’s a pretty small sample and not, I’d suggest, perhaps terribly relevant to the readership of a British newspaper. Worse, the actual levels of BPA weren’t measured in the large majority of samples – they only tested to see if it was there, not how much was there. There was nothing conclusive at all to suggest that the levels in the receipts might be enough to “increase your cancer risk”. All in all, it was pretty meaningless. We already knew there was BPA in thermal receipt paper – no one was hiding that information (it’s literally in the second paragraph of the Wikipedia page on BPA).

The Telegraph article, and the many others it appeared to spawn, also weren’t based on especially rigorous work and, worse, totally misrepresented the findings in any case. Firstly, let’s consider that headline: “Plastic chemical linked to male infertility in majority of teenagers, study suggests”. What does that mean? Are they suggesting that teenagers are displaying infertility? No, of course not. They didn’t want to put “BPA” in the headline because that, apparently, would be too confusing for their readers. So instead they’ve replaced “BPA” with “plastic chemical linked to male infertility”, which is so much more straightforward, isn’t it?

And they don’t mean it’s linked to infertility in the majority of teenagers, they mean it’s linked to infertility and it’s in the majority of teenager’s bodies. I do appreciate that journalists rarely write headlines – this isn’t a criticism of the poor writer who turned in perfectly good copy – but that is confusing and misleading headline-writing of the highest order. Ugh.

Plus, as I commented back there, that wasn’t even the conclusion of the study, which was actually an experiment carried out by students under the supervision of a local university. The key finding was not that, horror, teenagers have BPA in their bodies. The researchers assumed that almost all of the teenagers would have BPA in their bodies – as the EFSA report showed, most people do. No, the conclusion was actually that the teenagers – 94 of them – had been unable to significantly reduce their levels of BPA by changing their diet and lifestyle. Although the paper admits the conditions weren’t well-controlled. Basically, they asked a group of 17-19 year-olds to avoid plastic, and worked on the basis that their account of doing so was accurate.

And how much did the teenagers have in their samples? The average was 1.22 ng/ml, in urine samples (ng = nanogram). Now, even if we assume that these levels apply to all human tissue (which they almost certainly don’t) and that therefore the students had roughly 1.22 ng per gram of body weight, that only translates to, very approximately, 1.22 micrograms (µg) per kilogram of body weight.

Sooooo basically a very similar value, then? And the EFSA, after looking at multiple studies in painstaking detail, concluded that “BPA poses no health risk to consumers”.

Is this grounds for multiple hysterical, fear-mongering headlines? I really don’t think it is.

It is interesting that the teenagers were unable to reduce their BPA levels. Because it’s broken down and excreted quite quickly by the body, you might expect that reducing exposure would have a bigger effect – but really all we can say here is that this needs to be repeated with far more tightly-controlled conditions. Who knows what the students did, and didn’t, actually handle and eat. Perhaps their school environment contains high levels of BPA in dust for some reason (new buildings or equipment, maybe?), and so it was virtually impossible to avoid. Who knows.

In summary, despite the scary headlines there really is no need to worry too much about BPA from plastics or receipts. It may be worth avoiding heating plastic, since we know that increases the amound of BPA that makes its way into food – although it’s important to stress that there’s no evidence that microwaving plastic containers causes levels to be above safe limits. Still, if you wanted to be cautious you could choose to put food into a ceramic or glass bowl, covered with a plate rather than clingfilm. It’ll save you money on your clingfilm bills anyway, and it means less plastic waste, which is no bad thing.

Christmas is almost here! Are you ready yet? Are you fed up with people asking if you’re ready yet? Have you worked out what to buy for Great-uncle Nigel, who says he neither needs nor wants anything? Always a tricky scenario, that. Consumables are often a safe fallback position. They don’t clutter up the house, and who doesn’t enjoy a nice box of luxury biscuits, or chocolates, or a bottle of champagne, or spirts, or a case of blk water.

Wait, what?

Yes, this mysterious product turned up in my feed a few weeks ago. It’s water (well, so they say), but it’s black. Actually black. Not just black because the bottle’s black, black because the liquid inside it is… black.

It’s black water.

A bit like… cola. Only blacker, and not fizzy, or sweet, or with any discernable flavour other than water.

It raises many questions, doesn’t it? Let’s start with why. Obviously it’s a great marketing gimmick. It definitely looks different. It also comes with a number of interesting claims. The suppliers claim it contains “no nasties” and “only 2 ingredients”, namely spring water and “Fulvic Minerals” (sic). (Hang on, I hear you say, if it’s minerals, plural, surely that’s already more than two ingredients? Oh, but that’s only the start. Stay with me.)

It claims to “balance pH levels” and help “to regulate our highly acidic diets”. Yes, well, I think I’ve covered that before. Absolutely nothing you drink, or eat, does anything to the pH in any part of your body except, possibly, your urine – where you might see a small difference under some circumstances (but even if you do it doesn’t tell you anything significant about the impact of your diet on your long-term health). And bear in mind that a few minutes after you drink any kind of alkaline water it mixes with stomach acid which has a pH of around 2. Honestly, none of that alkaline “goodness” makes it past your pyloric sphincter.

Finally, blk water apparently “replenishes electrolytes”. Hm. Electrolytes are important in the body. They’re ionic species, which means they can conduct electricity. Your muscles and neurons rely on electrical activity, so they are quite important. Like, life or death important. But because of that our bodies are quite good at regulating them, most of the time. If you run marathons in deserts, or get struck down with a nasty case of food poisoning, or have some kind of serious health condition (you’d know about it) you might need to think about electrolytes, but otherwise most of us get what we need from the food and drink we consume normally every day.

Besides which, didn’t they say “only 2 ingredients”? The most common electrolytes in the body are sodium, potassium, magnesium, chloride, hydrogen phosphate and hydrogen carbonate. Most spring waters do contain some, if not all, of these, in greater or smaller amounts, but it’s not going to be enough to effectively “replenish” any of them. If, say, you are running marathons in the desert, the advice is actually to keep a careful eye on your water intake because drinking too much water can dangerously lower your sodium levels. Yes, there are sports drinks that are specifically designed to help with this, but they taste of salt and sugar and/or flavourings which have been added in a desperate attempt to cover up the salty taste. This is apparently not the case with blk water which, to repeat myself, contains “only 2 ingredients”.

Speaking of ingredients, what about those so-called fulvic minerals? Maybe they’re the source of those all-important electrolytes (but not sodium)? And maybe they’re magically tasteless, too?

And perhaps, like other magical objects and substances, they don’t actually exist – as geologist @geolizzy told me on Twitter when I asked.

It’s not looking good for blk water (£47.99 for a case of 24 bottles) at this point. But hang on. Perhaps when they said fulvic minerals, what they meant was fulvic acid – which is a thing, or possibly several things – in a the presence of oh, say, some bicarbonate (*cough* 2 ingredients *cough*).

That could push the pH up to the stated 8-9, and didn’t we learn in school that:
acid + alkali –> salt + water
and maybe, if we’re being generous, we could call the salts of fulvic acids minerals? It’s a bit shaky but… all right.

So what are fulvic acids?

That’s an interesting question. I had never heard of fulvic acids. They do, as it turns out, have a Wikipedia page (Wikipedia is usually very reliable for chemical information, since no one has yet been very interested in spoofing chemical pages to claim things like hydrochloric acid is extracted from the urine of pregnant unicorns) but the information wasn’t particularly enlightening. The page did inform me that fulvic acids are “components of the humus” (in soil) and are “similar to humic acids, with differences being the carbon and oxygen contents, acidity, degree of polymerization, molecular weight, and color.” The Twitter hive-mind, as you can see, was sending me down the same path…

A typical example of a humic acid.

Next stop, humic acids. Now we’re getting somewhere. These are big molecules with several functional groups. The chemists out there will observe that, yes, they contain several carboxylic acid groups (the COOH / HOOC ones you can see in the example) so, yes, it makes sense they’d behave as acids.

“No nasties”, blk said. “Pure” they said. When you hear those sorts of things, do you imagine something like this is in your drink? Especially one that, let’s be clear, is a component of soil?

Oh, hang on, I should’ve checked the “blk explained” page on the blk water website. There’s a heading which actually says “what are Fulvic Minerals”, let’s see now…

“Fulvic minerals are plant matter derived from millions of years ago that have combined with fulvic acid forming rare fulvic mineral deposits. They deliver some of the most powerful electrolytes in the world.”

“Fulvic minerals contain 77 other trace minerals, most of which have an influence on the healthiness of our body. They are very high in alkaline and when sourced from the ground contain a pH of 9.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not totally convinced. I mean, as @geolizzy says in her tweet here (excuse the minor typo, she means humic, not humid), it sounds a bit like… water contaminated with hydrocarbon deposits?

Yummy.

And, by the way, the phrase “very high in alkaline” is utterly meaningless. Substances are alkaline, or they containsubstances which are alkaline. “Alkaline” is not a thing in itself. This is like saying my tea is high in hot when sourced from the teapot.

There’s one more thing to add. So far this might sound a bit weird but… probably safe, right? What could be more wholesome than a bit of soil? Didn’t your granny tell you to eat a pinch of soil to boost your immune system, or something? At worst it’s harmless, right?

Tap water is chlorine-treated to keep it free of nasty bacteria.

Maybe. But then again… water is often treated with chlorine compounds to keep it bacteria-free. Now, blk water is supposedly spring water, which isn’t usually treated. But hypothetically, let’s consider what happens when humic acids, or fulvic acids, or whatever we’re calling them, come into contact with chlorine-treated water.

To sum up: it is black, and that’s kind of weird and a fun talking point – although if you like the idea of a black drink you can always drink cola. It doesn’t balance your pH levels – nothing does. I don’t believe it replenishes electrolyte levels either – how can it when it doesn’t contain sodium? – and I’m dubious about the “2 ingredients” claim (could you tell?). And the oh-so-healthy-sounding fulvic minerals are most likely due to contamination from coal deposits.

All in all, whilst it might not be quite such a conversation piece, I think it would be better to get Great-uncle Nigel a nice box of chocolates this year.

Fresh fruit and vegetables are great, but where’s the best place to store them?

I’ve mentioned before that my Dad is a professional plant-wrangler (if you’ve never read the electric daisies post, do go and have a look – it’s a little-read favourite) and he often brings me home-grown fruit and vegetables.

What follows is an inevitable disagreement about storage, specifically, my habit of putting everything in the fridge.

In my defence, modern houses rarely have pantries (boo) and we don’t even have a garage. We do have a shed, but it’s at the bottom of our poorly-lit, somewhat muddy garden. Do I want to traipse out there on a cold, dark, autumn evening? No, I do not. So the fabled “cool, dark place” is a bit of problem. My fridge is cool and dark, I have argued, but here’s the thing – turns out, it’s too cool. And quite probably too dark.

This I have learned from the botanist James Wong (@botanygeek on Twitter), whose talk I attended on Monday this week at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford. James, it turns out, had a rather similar argument with his Mum, particularly regarding tomatoes.

We should’ve listened to out parents, because they were right. A lot of fruit and vegetables really are better stored outside of the fridge, and for tomatoes in particular “better” actually means “more nutritious”.

Lycopene is a very long molecule with lots of double C=C bonds.

Tomatoes, James explained, contain a lot of a chemical called lycopene. It’s a carotene pigment, and it’s what gives tomatoes their red colour.

Lycopene has lots of double bonds between its carbon atoms which form something chemists call a conjugated system. This has some rather cool properties, one of which is an ability to absorb certain wavelengths of light. Lycopene is especially good at absorbing blue and green wavelengths, leaving our eyes to detect the red light that’s left.

Tomatoes and lycopene also seem to have a lot of health benefits. There’s some evidence that lycopene might reduce the risk of prostate and other cancers. It also appears to reduce the risk of stroke, and eating tomato concentrate might even help to protect your skin from sun damage (don’t get any ideas, you still need sunblock). Admittedly the evidence is currently a bit shaky – it’s a case of “more research is needed” – but even if it turns out to that the causative relationship isn’t terribly strong, tomatoes are still a really good source of fibre and vitamins A, C and E. Plus, you know, they taste yummy!

But back to the fridge. Surely they will keep longer in the fridge, and the low temperatures will help to preserve the nutrients? Isn’t that how it works?

Well, no. As James explained, once tomatoes are severed from the plant they have exactly one purpose: to get eaten. The reason, from the plant’s point of view, is that the critter which eats them will hopefully wander off and – ahem – eliminate the tomato seeds at a later time, somewhere away from the parent plant. This spreads the seeds far and wide, allowing little baby tomato plants to grow in a nice, open space with lots of water and sun.

For this reason once the tomato fruit falls, or is cut, from the tomato plant it doesn’t just sit there doing nothing. No, it carries on producing lycopene. Or rather, it does if the temperature is above about 10 oC. Below that temperature (as in a fridge), everything more or less stops. But, leave a tomato at room temperature and lycopene levels increase significantly. Plus, the tomato pumps out extra volatile compounds – both as an insect repellant and to attract animals which might usefully eat it – which means… yes: room temperature tomatoes really do smell better. As if that weren’t enough, chilling tomatoes can damage cell membranes, which can actually cause them to spoil more quickly.

In summary, not only will tomatoes last longer out of the fridge, they will actually contain more healthy lycopene!

Anecdotally, once I got over my scepticism and actually started leaving my tomatoes on my windowsill (after years of refrigeration) I discovered that it’s true. My windowsill tomatoes really do seem to last longer than they used to in the fridge, and they almost never go mouldy. Of course, it’s possible that I might not be comparing like for like (who knows what variety of tomato I bought last year compared to this week), but I urge you to try it for yourself.

James mentioned lots of other interesting bits and pieces in his talk. Did you know that sun-dried shiitake mushrooms are much higher in vitamin D? Or that you can double the amount of flavonoid you absorb from your blueberries by cooking them? (Take that, raw food people!) Storing apples on your windowsill is likely to increase the amount of healthy polyphenols in their skin, red peppers are better for you than green ones, adding mustard to cooked broccoli makes it more nutritious, and it would be much better if we bought our butternut squash in the autumn and saved it for Christmas – it becomes sweeter and more flavoursome over time.

In short, fascinating. Who wants to listen to some “clean eater” making it up as they go along when you can listen to a fully-qualified botanist who really knows what he’s talking about? Do check out the book, How to Eat Better, by James Wong – it’s packed full of brilliant tidbits like this and has loads of recipes.

It was Halloween yesterday and, unusually for the UK, it fell in school term time. As it turned out, I was teaching chemistry to a group of 12-13 year olds on that day which was too good an opportunity to miss.

Time for the puking pumpkin!

A side note: there’s loads of great chemistry here, and the pumpkin isn’t essential – you could easily do this same experiment during a less pumpkin-prolific month with something else. Puking watermelon, anyone?

Carve a large mouth, draw the eyes and nose with marker pen.

First things first, prepare your pumpkin! Choose a large one – you need room to put a conical flask inside and put the pumpkin’s “lid” securely back in place.

Carve the mouth in the any shape you like, but make it generous. Draw the eyes and nose (and any other decoration) in waterproof marker – unless you want your pumpkin to “puke” out of its nose and eyes as well!

Rest the pumpkin on something wipe-clean (it might leak from the bottom) and put a deep tray in front of it.

To make the “puke” you will need:

35% hydrogen peroxide (corrosive)

a stock solution of KI, potassium iodide (low hazard)

washing up liquid

The puking pumpkin!

You can also add food colouring or dye, but be aware that the reaction can completely change or even destroy the colours you started with. If colour matters to you, test it first.

Method:

Place about 50 ml (use more if it’s not so fresh) of the hydrogen peroxide into the conical flask, add a few drops of washing up liquid (and dye, if you’re using it).

What’s happening? Hydrogen peroxide readily decomposes into oxygen and water, but at room temperature this reaction is slow. KI catalyses the reaction, i.e. speeds it up. (There are other catalysts you could also try if you want to experiment; potassium permanganate for example.) The washing up liquid traps the oxygen gas in foam to produce the “puke”.

The word and symbol equations are:

hydrogen peroxide –> water + oxygen
2H2O2 –> 2H2O + O2

There are several teaching points here:

Evidence for chemical change.

Compounds vs. elements.

Breaking the chemical bonds in a compound to form an element and another compound.

Balanced equations / conservation of mass.

The idea that when it comes to chemical processes, it’s not just whether a reaction happens that matters, but also how fast it happens…

… which of course leads to catalysis. A-level students can look at the relevant equations (see below).

Once the pumpkin has finished puking, demonstrate the test for oxygen gas.

Some health and safety points: the hydrogen peroxide is corrosive so avoid skin contact. Safety goggles are essential, gloves are a Good Idea(™). The reaction is exothermic and steam is produced. A heavy pumpkin lid will almost certainly stay in place but still, stand well back.

But we’re not done, oh no! What you have at the end of this reaction is essentially a pumpkin full of oxygen gas. Time to crack out the splints and demonstrate/remind your students of the test for oxygen. It’s endlessly fun to put a glowing splint into the pumpkin’s mouth and watch it catch fire, and you’ll be able to do it several times.

And we’re still not done! Once the pumpkin has completely finished “puking”, open it up (carefully) and look inside. Check out that colour! Why is it bluish-black in there?

The inside of the pumpkin is blue-black: iodine is produced which complexes with starch.

It turns out that you also get some iodine produced, and there’s starch in pumpkins. It’s the classic, blue-black starch complex.

Finally, give the outside of the pumpkin a good wipe, take it home, carve out the eyes and nose and pop it outside for the trick or treaters – it’s completely safe to use.

Brace yourselves, more equations coming…

The KI catalyses the reaction because the iodide ions provide an alternative, lower-energy pathway for the decomposition reaction. The iodide reacts with the hydrogen peroxide to form hypoiodite ions (OI–). These react with more hydrogen peroxide to form water, oxygen and more iodide ions – so the iodide is regenerated, and hence is acting as a catalyst.

I’m sure most people have heard of hydrogen peroxide. It’s used as a disinfectant and, even if you’ve never used it for that, you probably at least know that it’s used to bleach hair. It’s where the phrase “peroxide blonde” comes from, after all. Hydrogen peroxide, and its formula, is so famous that there’s an old chemistry joke about it:

(I have no idea who to credit for the original drawing – if it’s you, leave me a message.)

To save you squinting at the text, it goes like this:
Two men walk into a bar. The first man says, “I’ll have some H2O.”
The second man says, “I’ll have some H2O, too.”
The barman brings the drinks. The second man dies horribly.

Now I think about it, it’s not a terribly funny joke.

Hydrogen peroxide has an extra oxygen atom in the middle.

Never mind. You get the idea. H2O2 (“H2O, too”) is the formula for hydrogen peroxide. Very similar to water’s formula, except with an extra oxygen atom in the middle. In fact, naturopaths – purveyors of alternative therapies – often refer to hydrogen peroxide as “water with extra oxygen”. But this is really misleading because, to torture a metaphor, that extra oxygen makes hydrogen peroxide the piranha to water’s goldfish.

More concentrated** solutions are potentially very dangerous, causing severe skin burns. Hydrogen peroxide is also well-known for its tendency to react violently with other chemicals, meaning that it must be stored, and handled, very carefully.

All of which makes the idea of injecting into someone’s veins particularly horrific.

But this is exactly what some naturopaths are recommending, and even doing. The idea seems to have arisen because hydrogen peroxide is known to damage cancer cells. But so will a lot of other dangerous substances – it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to inject them. Hydrogen peroxide is produced by certain immune cells in the body, but only in a very controlled and contained way. This is definitely a case where more isn’t necessarily better.

Do I need to state the obvious? If anyone suggests injecting this stuff, run. Run very fast, in the other direction. Likewise if they suggest drinking it. It’s a really stupid idea, one that could quite literally kill you.

* As anyone who’s ever studied chemistry anywhere in my vicinity will tell you, “iron three is yellow, like wee.”

** The concentration of hydrogen peroxide is usually described in one of two ways: percentage and “vol”. Percentage works as you might expect, but vol is a little different. It came about for practical, historical reasons. As Prof. Poliakoff comments in this video, hydrogen peroxide is prone to going “flat” – leave it in the bottle for long enough and it gradually decomposes until what you actually have is a bottle of ordinary water. Particularly in the days before refrigeration (keeping it cold slows down the decomposition) a bottle might be labelled 20%, but actually contain considerably less hydrogen peroxide.

What to do? The answer was quite simple: take, say, 1 ml of hydrogen peroxide, add something which causes it to decompose really, really fast (lots of things will do this: potassium permanganate, potassium iodide, yeast, even liver) and measure the volume of oxygen given off. If your 1 ml of hydrogen peroxide produces 10 ml of oxygen, it’s 10 vol. If it produces 20, it’s 20 vol. And so on. Simple. 3% hydrogen peroxide, for the record, is about 10 vol***. Do not mix up these numbers.

*** Naturally, there are mole calculations to go with this. Of course there are. For A-level Chemists, here’s the maths (everyone else can tune out; I’m adding this little footnote because I found this information strangely hard to find):

Assuming the oxygen gas occupies 24 dm3 (litres), or 24000 mls, at standard temperature and pressure, 10 mls of oxygen is 10 / 24000 = 0.0004167 moles. But, according to the equation, we need two molecules of hydrogen peroxide to make one molecule of oxygen, so we need to multiply this number by two, giving us 0.0008333 moles.

To get the concentration of the hydrogen peroxide in the more familar (to chemists, anyway) mol dm-3, just divide that number of moles by the volume of hydrogen peroxide. In other words:

0.0008333 mols / 0.001 dm3 = 0.833 mol dm-3

If you really want to convert this into a percentage by mass (you can see why people stick with “vol” now, right?), then:

Slime is a fun bit of chemistry that anyone can do – but how safe is it?

Edit, December 2018: I’ve written another, more recent, slime post which specifically addresses some of the recent safety claims made in the media. Read it here.

It’s August, which means it’s the school summer holidays in the UK and, as is traditional, it’s been pouring with rain. This has left many a cabin-fevered child searching for ways to amuse themselves.

Start hunting around the internet for things to do and it’s not long before the concept of the “kitchen science” experiment turns up. There are actually loads of these, and it’s even possible to do some of them without permanently damaging anyone’s eardrums, dusting every surface with cornflour and leaving a parent rocking in the corner muttering “why did I encourage this?” over and over to themselves.

Which brings me to slime – surely the go-to fun science experiment. What’s not to love about taking some of that white, runny PVA glue found in gallon bottles in school classrooms everywhere and magically turning it into glorious, gloopy slime? Add some food colouring and you can even have coloured slime! Add glitter and… well you get the idea.

Many YouTubers love this stuff. A quick search for “make your own slime” turns up pages and pages of videos, giving instructions as to how to do just that.

In fact, it seems that slime-making is currently a bit of a craze, with children all over the world making all kids of different types. There’s unicorn slime, rainbow slime, fluffy slime – you name it. Brilliant, you might think, a whole generation of youngsters interested in chemistry. What’s not to like about that?

Slime, you see, is a really nice example of polymerisation – the same process that goes on when plastics are made. PVA glue, the usual starting material, is a polymer itself. The letters PVA stand for polyvinyl alcohol (its systematic name is poly(1-hydroxyethylene)), but literally no one calls it that, not even A-level chemistry teachers forced, kicking and screaming, to follow IUPAC naming conventions).

PVA is a long chain of carbon atoms with alternating CH2 groups and alcohol, OH, groups. As anyone who’s ever handled it will know, it’s quite runny. Thick, yes, but still runny. Basically, it’s a liquid.

But if you mix it with borax, aka sodium tetraborate, some magic happens. And when I say magic, I mean chemistry. The chains of atoms become linked together (edit July 2018: I originally said via hydrogen bonds but turns out that’s not quite right – check out this page on c&en for more info), and as a result the new substance is a lot more solid. But it’s not quite solid. At least, not in the sense of something that keeps its own shape. No, this is weird, peculiar, stuff that sits somewhere in between solid and liquid.

Borax joins the chains of PVA together.

There’s something tactilely pleasing about slime. Put it in your hands and it feels cool and slightly moist – your fingers slide over and through it with a sort of squeaky sensation. Leave it alone for a few minutes and it flows to take the shape of its container, forming a perfect, mirror finish on its surface. Tip the pot over, and it will gradually creep toward the edge.

It is safe to handle. Here are my hands, handling it (we made this at the March for Science in Bristol back in April). You will notice that my skin is not falling off.

It’s white unless you dye it. We went for red, which is pleasingly disturbing.

I did, though, wash my hands after I took that photo. And that’s because, while the PVA is pretty harmless (as you know if, like me, you spent your primary school days painting your hands with glue just so you could peel it off later) the borax isn’t. At least, not entirely.

Before I go any further, let’s be clear: lots of things aren’t “entirely” safe. Most of the cleaning products in the average kitchen and bathroom have warning levels of varying degrees of severity on them, and we don’t think too much about it. Even things that are designed to be in contact with skin, like hand soap and shampoo, usually have warnings about eye irritation and statements like “if irritation occurs, discontinue use”. Even water is deadly in the wrong context (don’t try inhaling too much of it, for example). So when I say not entirely safe, I don’t mean to suggest that panic needs to ensue if your child has so much as looked at a borax solution.

Borax has traditionally been used in several household products, although admittedly more in the US than in the UK. Most people know it as a laundry additive, where it softens water, brightens whites and inhibits the growth of the bacteria and fungi which can make clothes stinky.

It’s not considered a lethal compound, in the sense that you’d have to eat a large quantity – far more than anyone might reasonably consume by accident – before it became deadly, and you’d almost certainly throw up long before then. Borax can irritate the skin (but see note at the end), and inhalation of the dust is well known to irritate the lungs. This is more of a concern for people working with borax on an industrial scale day in and day out – but it could become an issue if, say, someone were making slime every single day using large quantities of borax (not recommended).

Then there’s another concern. If borax is exposed to hydrochloric acid, it forms boric acid. Long-term exposure to boric acid can cause kidney damage and fertility problems, both in men and women. It’s also potentially teratogenic, which means it could cause harm to an unborn child. Borax and boric acid are not the same thing but, of course, our stomachs contain hydrochloric acid. Therefore, if you swallow borax, you’re effectively exposed to boric acid.

Now, the chances of achieving the levels involved in “long-term exposure” from occasionally handling borax solutions are slim to none. It’s safe to handle dilute borax solutions (see notes at the end). Indeed, borax is even approved as a food preservative in the EU (E285). To put it into context, alcohol (ethanol) also causes organ damage and is a known teratogen and a carcinogen (which borax isn’t) and that turns up in all sorts of things we’re regularly in contact with, everything from antiseptic hand gels to mouthwashes to drinks (and it’s also approved as a food additive, E1510 – which is good news if you like liqueur chocolates).

I personally have no concerns about handling dry borax in small quantities to make up solutions myself. However, I wouldn’t let children do that part. Once made I’d consider the solution safe, so long as children were supervised and weren’t doing anything really silly like drinking it. I’d also tell children to wash their hands after handling the slime and, if I thought they had sensitive skin for any reason (eczema, say) I’d suggest plastic gloves.

Borax is easy to buy online.

Because of the European Regulations, it theoretically shouldn’t be that easy to get hold of borax in the UK. But I found it for sale on Amazon.co.uk. The listing says that it “can only be purchased by Professionals and by trade and business users,” (sic) but I ordered some and there were no checks. A plastic bag full of borax powder (the decahydrate, Na2B4O7.10H2O) arrived within a few days.

Most of the news reports doing the rounds have involved children suffering from severe skin irritation. For example, in February this year a woman from Manchester posted photos of chemical burns on her daughter’s hands online as a warning to other parents. However, looking into the details of that story it turns out that she wasn’t using borax. In fact, she used fabric detergent “as an alternative”.

Take a look at pretty much type of fabric detergent and you’ll find hazard warnings, usually indicating it’s corrosive and definitely saying “keep out of reach of children”. Those are there for a reason. Fabric detergent is designed to remove grease and stains. In other words, to break down fats and proteins, and guess what your skin is made of? Yep. Don’t get neat fabric detergent on your hands. Even if your skin isn’t particularly sensitive, it’s almost certainly going to irritate it.

Fabric detergents are usually labelled corrosive.

Bottom line: don’t use fabric detergent as a borax alternative to make slime, because there’s a real risk that enough of it could get onto your (or your child’s) skin that it could irritate.

When it comes to borax itself, if I understand things correctly, it’s not actually restricted in the EU – including the UK – yet. (I might have this wrong – do correct me if you think I have.) It’s not something you can pop to the supermarket and buy, but as we’ve established you can buy it online fairly easily.

Borax solutions are extremely unlikely to cause harm, if used sensibly (boron chemist David Schubert agrees, see note at the end). But, once again: if you’re doing this experiment it’s best not to let children make up the solution – an adult should do that part.

A sensible quantity is about 1 gram of borax in 25 millilitres of warm water (for those without a metric scale: one level teaspoon of borax in half a cup measure of water). This will actually polymerise quite a bit of PVA – you don’t need that much. I recommend making the borax solution in a labelled plastic cup which you should throw away afterwards. Don’t leave it anywhere where someone might mistake it for their drink! Once the solution is made just add a little bit to some PVA in another plastic cup, give it a good stir with a spoon or a lolly stick, and the magic (chemistry) will happen. Add food colouring if you like (be aware that it can stain!) and enjoy the slimy goodness. (See additional note for teachers & technicians at the end.)

Do supervise any and all slime-making, don’t let children handle slime all day, every day, and if you know they have sensitive skin, make them wear plastic gloves. Make them wash their hands before they eat or drink anything.

If a child has made slime somewhere else, at a party or a science club, say, and they bring it home, again, there’s no need to worry. They can play with it perfectly safely. Don’t let them leave it on a radiator, though. That will end in disaster.

I am not a fan of the “it might be a bit dangerous, so no one should ever try it” mentality. I mean, that’s just no fun, is it? But I’m also not a fan of unnecessary risks – because trips to hospital are equally no fun. So if you want to try this experiment, I’ve summarised my guidance in this graphic.

Stay safe with slime by following this guidance

And if you want a even safer slimy experiment, and you can bear the mess, I suggest mixing cornflour with just enough water to make a thick paste in a shallow tray. Then let your kids stick their fingers in it, bounce things off it, and generally play with it. (Check out this link to find out more about why it behaves as it does.) I’m told it makes an even better mixture if you add basil seeds.

Have fun this summer, stay safe, and don’t eat the slime!

Note for teachers and technicians:
This post is aimed at people who might be making slime at home, and hence not have easy access to CLEAPSS guidelines. Anyone doing the experiment with students in school should, of course, refer to their department’s risk assessments and policies. For the record, at the time of writing, CLEAPSS classify 0.2M or 40g/dm³ (or more dilute) borax solutions as “low hazard”.

Edit: 15th August 2017:
After I wrote and published this post I was contacted by someone who specialises in boron chemistry, David Schubert. Now, if anyone knows about boron safety, it’ll be the guy who spends all day working with boron-based chemicals! He told me that borax has been shown to be safe for skin contact. He also said that you absorb less boron through intact skin than you consume by eating a normal, healthy diet (boron is a naturally-occurring trace-mineral – nuts and pulses are good sources), and even provided me with a link to a research paper on the subject. I asked him about the high pH of boron solutions, since alkaline solutions can be irritating in general, and he told me that borax solutions are less alkaline than sodium carbonate and not at all irritating to skin. At this point I will stress that when we’ve seen reports of children suffering skin irritation after making slime, it hasn’t been clear exactly what they’ve been handling. It’s very likely they were adding other chemicals to their slime, and it was actually one of those causing the irritation. Perhaps they developed an allergy to something. It’s impossible to say. Either way, the bottom line is that borax solutions are pretty safe – there’s no need to worry. (Still don’t drink them though!)